Privacy and Texting - infomercial

Living in Surveillance Societies Website

A new website for the Living in Surveillance Societies programme - I'll repeat their blurb here. Good stuff. It's good to see a major initiative like this in the field.

The Living in Surveillance Societies (LiSS) COST Action is a European research programme designed to increase and deepen knowledge about living and working in the surveillance age, in order to better understand the consequences and impacts of enhanced surveillance, and subsequently to make recommendations about its future governance and practice. The underlying theme of the programme is that technologically mediated surveillance - the systematic and purposeful attention to the lives of individuals or groups utilising new ICTs - is a ubiquitous feature of modern society, with citizens routinely monitored by a range of sophisticated technologies. Yet, despite these developments relatively little is known about the depth of personal surveillance or how our personal information is used.

The LiSS programme is the first international multidisciplinary academic programme to consider issues relating to everyday life in surveillance societies. At it’s heart is a network of academic surveillance experts generating important knowledge for academia, citizens, government, public agencies and private sector. It is also raising awareness of surveillance in society and is contributing to better informed surveillance policy and practice across Europe. The four year programme, which started in April 2009, is administered by COST (European Cooperation in the field of Scientific and Technical Research) and supported by the EU Framework Programme. The programme is facilitating thematic collaborative research in the field of technologically mediated surveillance through a series of active working groups, workshops, seminars, annual conferences, publications, short-term scientific missions and a doctoral school for young researchers in the field. To date, this collaborative venture has attracted over 100 expert participants from 20 European countries.

Surveillance in the news over the last year

This is a very crude visualisation, but I've got a lexis nexis alert which gives me a summary each week of UK newspaper articles with 'surveillance' and 'big brother' in them (from a previous project) and I thought I might collate some of the data together. This one might be a bit too granular, but I'm thinking over overlaying it with some significant 'surveillance events' that got or caused the news coverage. The following image shows the same data, but aggregated by month.
It's early days on this, not entirely sure if it actually tells us anything, apart from surveillance topics (using the trope of big brother) crop up pretty regularly in UK newspapers, and that there is some variation in this (there were only a couple of weeks in the year when there was nothing) and that there tend to be some big spikes which look like they're linked to specific newsworthy events. There' s a background level of editorial comment on the issue too.

ID Cards Website

copying this text from an email I just recieved:

New Website Launched

http://www.identity-cards.net/ the national id cards website

This website contains a comprehensive listing of national ID cards by geographic region worldwide allowing users to study and compare specific national policies regarding identity cards, as well as a list of resources on the topic.

National identification systems have been proliferating in recent years as part of a concerted drive to find common identifiers for populations around the world. Whether the driving force is immigration control, anti-terrorism, electronic government or rising rates of identity theft, identity card systems are being developed, proposed or debated in most countries. However, there is no comprehensive database documenting the status of national identity card systems anywhere in the world, and this website has been designed in order to fill this gap.

We invite users to help compile this information. Go to ‘UPDATE ID INFORMATION’ and follow the steps to submit current information about national ID card systems globally.

This website has been developed under The New Transparency Project an MCRI project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The idea for the website is prompted by the book "Playing the Identity Card" recently edited by Colin Bennett and David Lyon, and published by Routledge (2008). The website is maintained and updated by a group of students and faculty from Queen's University and the University of Victoria.

privacy in searches on google, yahoo and bing

Cybernet article on privacy for searches using various browser add ons and tricks. Found it thought www.Lifehacker.com

iWatch

privacy as social rather than technological problem

I would have thought this postion was fairly obvious, but then, social scientist....
http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/felten/privacy-social-problem-not-technology-problem

the freedom to tinker blog is hosted by princeton's Centre for Information Technology Policy. Who seem to be starting to do some interesting work. Not a lot of material on the centre page, but more on the blog itself.